Descartes Meditation 2

Descartes concludes from his first meditation that he is a thinking thing, and as long as he thinks, he exists. In the second meditation, Descartes attempts to define what the “thinking thing” that he concluded himself to be in the first meditation actually was. Descartes’ determines that he gains knowledge of the world, that is, knowledge that is separate from the mind, through the senses; and that the senses can deceive. This he outlines within the first meditation, and mentions on the second meditation. Furthermore, in the second meditation, Descartes refuses to define himself as a rational animal, instead going back and relying on labeling him mind as a thinking thing. In the fifth and sixth paragraphs of the second meditation, Descartes distinguishes the body from the soul. Descartes indicates that there is the presence of the body, and it seems to be in the physical world, but he also notes that his mind does not seem to exist in the same manner. Descartes also claims that the ability to perceive is a power of the soul, but inoperable without the body. Descartes then explores another object with physical substance, which is a piece of wax. The piece of wax is undeniably physical; it takes up space within the material world. The body falls into the category, just as any other physical object in the material world. The main point of Descartes’ second meditation is that any given person can know more about their mind than of the world surrounding them.

Descartes has written a set of six meditations on the first philosophy. In these meditations he analyzes his beliefs and questions where those beliefs were derived from. The first mediation of Descartes discusses his skeptical hypotheses; questioning the validity of the influences of his knowledge. He has a few main goals that are expressed through the first meditation. First off, Descartes wants to build a firm foundation of knowledge that is also concrete. Through probing his mind for answers to all of his skeptical thoughts, he hopes to eliminate the skepticism and find true, unquestionable knowledge. Descartes has mapped out ways to

In his defense, Descartes argues that our knowledge of the wax depends only on the ideas we conceive in our mind. This creates the difficulty of reaching an agreement on the identity of the wax, and that understanding the body can vary for each individual perception. As it is evident that the substantiality of

     This is where the wax argument comes into play. All the properties of the piece of wax that we perceive with the senses change as the wax melts. This is true as well of its primary properties, such as shape, extension and size. Yet the wax remains the same piece of wax as it melts. We know the wax through our mind and judgement, not through our senses or imagination. Therefore, every act of clear and distinct knowledge of corporeal matter also provides even more certain evidence for the existence of Descartes as a thinking thing. Therefore his mind is much clearer and more distinctly know to him than his body. At this

Descartes starts his distinction of mind and by writing of his senses, that he has

Rene Descartes Meditations is known to be one of his most famous works, it has also shown to be very important in Philosophical Epistemology. Within the meditation’s he provides many arguments that remove pre-existing notions, and bring it to the root of its foundation which Descartes, then will come up with his indubitable foundation of knowledge to defeat any doubt and to prove God is real. Descartes was a “foundationalist”, by introducing a new way of knowledge and with clearing up how people thought about things prior. Descartes took knowledge to its very foundations, and from there he can build up from it. In this essay, I will be discussing Descartes, and analyzing his first two meditations and arguing that he does indeed succeed in his argument.

In Meditation Four, Descartes proposes that when we have clear and distinct ideas, we are compelled to accept their truth, whereas when our ideas are not clear and distinct, we are left indifferent. He makes this clear when he says, “indifference does not merely apply to cases where the intellect is wholly ignorant, but extends in general to every case where the intellect does not have sufficiently clear knowledge at the time when the will deliberates (Meditation VI, 59).” Hence, indifference is a lack of knowledge of what is the true or right course to pursue— that is, when no rationale persuades an individual in a certain direction rather than another, they are undergoing indifference— and this is thought to be the lowest form of freedom.

In Meditation one, Descartes realizes that most of his senses are not depicting the truth to him and therefore, he seeks a way to understand what is or isn’t true in the world he lives in. He knows that not everything that he sees or knows is wrong and his idea is to prove that simple things are irrefutably true. He believes that if the foundations upon which he bases what is true to him are not true, everything else could be wrong. This idea led him to question whether or not he was living in a dream and all of what he is seeing would be wrong. In in quest for truth, Descartes does not try to prove that everything is true but that the doubts he has about reality can never be ruled out entirely.

In meditation two, Descartes’ wax argument is an observation and an essential part of how he develops his theory of the mind and body being separate from each other. It begins by Descartes taking a piece of fresh wax and describing it. He describes the wax through his sensory perception of it. He describes the faint taste of honey, the smell of flowers, the yellow coloring, the cool to the touch, and the sound it makes when it is tapped. He takes all of these sensory perceptions and understands it to be a piece of wax. He then melts the wax. When the wax melted it eliminated all of the qualities he perceived it to have through his senses. When the wax melted the taste was gone, the smell and color were gone. It no longer made a sound when touched and it was now hot instead of cool. The wax was no longer the same. It was now different.

In the second meditation Descartes seems to finally come to an understanding and answers his own questions about what he is and what makes him that

After seeing that the ball of wax had changed so much he wants to list what he can say for certainty is true. Descartes says that he knows the wax is “extended, flexible, and changeable thing” (Descartes p.161). He realizes that the information he gained did not come through his senses. His senses had led him astray leaving him to believe that this information either came from his imagination or his mind. However, Descartes also decides that he could not have imagined that the wax would had these characteristics or imagine the innumerous forms the wax could take. That just leaves one possible solution according to Descartes. He assumes that he knows these characteristics from intellect alone. His senses and imagination left him confused but by applying knowledge his thoughts were cleared up. By his use of knowledge, he was able to determine the what the wax really was. An object might be described by the senses but that description is not what an object is. That description is merely some characteristics in the objects current state but they do not define the object. The essence of an object,

But Descartes first starts of the meditation by acknowledging that he is in a fact, a living thing, that can think, and even have doubt. After acknowledging things, he then starts to question what he knows, as if can he can be certain that what he sees and knows is true.” The first instance of knowledge, there is nothing but a certain clear and distinct perception of what I affirm. Yet this will hardly be enough to render me certain of the truth of things if it could ever happen that something I perceived so clear and distinctly was false” (24). He was stating that with knowledge, things seem to be clear and distinct but he has perceived things as clear and distinct before and it wasn’t true.

In the Meditations, Descartes reflects on all of the faultiness in his life and of the body. He begins by discussing his life, noting that he has to raze everything that he once thought to the ground and begin again from the original foundations in order to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences. (13) Descartes, through the first meditation make the argument that we are all dreaming.

As Descartes mentions on the second meditation, “Some things aren’t strictly perceived by the faculty imagination or senses alone.” People are entitled to an opinion and such opinion may be biased based on the understandings of what something is or isn’t. We may understand that something exists by the mere fact that it is tangible to us, that we can perceive it. However, as Descartes highlighted with the wax example, things can take different forms. For instance, a body of water can change when exposed to different temperatures, but that doesn’t mean that it no longer exists. We expect water to appear in front to us as a liquid to understand that it is the water that we drink or use to shower. The water can turn into vapor and still exist in

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes strives first and foremost to provide an infallibly justified foundation for the empirical sciences, and second to prove the existence of God. I will focus on the first and second meditations in my attempt to show that, in his skepticism of the sources of knowledge, he fails to follow the rules he has set out in the Discourse on Method. First I claim that Descartes fails to draw the distinction between pure sensation and inference, which make up what he calls sensation, and then consider the consequences of this failure to follow his method. Second, I will show that in his treatment of thinking Descartes fails to distinguish between active and passive thinking.